Iliana G. Perez

Executive Director of Immigrants Rising

Over the past decade at Immigrants Rising, Dr. Perez has developed resources and training to inform undocumented people about entrepreneurship; has developed programming to help undocumented people start and grow their businesses; and has worked closely with individuals and organizations across the U.S. to build an ecosystem geared toward connecting and supporting undocumented entrepreneurs.

Dr. Perez's research has focused on immigrant entrepreneurs, the occupational and educational attainment of immigrant students, and economics of immigration. Her Ph.D. dissertation analyzed the determinants to pursue entrepreneurship, characteristics, and the economic returns of Latinx millennial undocumented entrepreneurs.

Dr. Perez immigrated to the U.S. from Mexico alongside her mother, father and younger brother to the U.S. at the age of eight. She grew up in the California Central Valley and was undocumented for 27 years before adjusting her status. Iliana holds a B.A. in Mathematics

Tessa West

Professor of Psychology, New York University

Tessa West is a Professor of Psychology at New York University and a leading expert in the science of interpersonal communication. She has received several career awards, including the early career award from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology, and the Theoretical Innovation Prize from the Foundation for Personality and Social Psychology.

Tessa’s work has been covered by Scientific American, the New York Times, ABC World News, CNBC, TIME, the Financial Times, The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, Bloomberg, Strategy and Business, and the US Supreme Court. She has appeared on CNN, Good Morning America, The Daily Blast, and Ireland AM, and is a regular contributor to the Wall Street Journal.

She is the author of the book “Jerks at Work: Toxic coworkers and what to do about them” and the upcoming book "Job Therapy: What you need to know about yourself to find the job you love."

Juan A. Rios

Assistant Professor of Social Work, Seton Hall University

As a practitioner scholar, I believe in the importance of integrating our theoretical knowledge to our practice in the field of Social Work. It is my academic mission to ensure our students are constantly applying scholastic thought with applied learning. My experience is both in non-profit and government sectors and presently the Clinical Director of a multiservice specialty practice and serves as a clinical consultant to community mental health agencies.

My research interest are the following: Clinical phenomenological field narratives and self-reflexivity, Chinese philosophy on modern philanthropy, mindfulness intervention with immigrant and first generation children, and cultural intersection among men and masculinity. I have presented nationally and internationally at various Social Work conferences regarding the above and extremely passionate about this profession and equally as passionate about educating the future leaders of this field on deconstructing oppressive social systems.

Social Work is the quintessential transdisciplinary field, and as educators and student scholars we must upload the charge to lead discussions about social change and interpersonal healing both in the classroom and with our respective communities. It is my intent to provide a learning environment that breeds ontological thought in order to move our legislation, communities and most importantly ourselves through the stages of change.

Angel Yau

Director of Academic Technologies, Information Technology Group

Angel Yau is an established comedian, storyteller, writer and award-winning filmmaker from Queens, New York. She is currently the Director of Multimedia at Columbia Business School.

Angel is an NBC Diversity Scholar for her comedic out of the box characters. Her comedy will always surprise and never ends the way it starts. She has performed at several comedy festivals such as NY Underground Comedy Festival, SF sketchfest, and many more. She has appeared on PBS, NBC, Amazon, HBO and Netflix. She was recently featured in a BBC documentary about being an Asian American woman in comedy, dealing with mental health, called, “Will I ever be Happy?”

Angel also makes stop-motion short films exploring her childhood in heartfelt ways dealing with solitude, rejection and alienation. One of her recent animations, "Extra Credit" has won several awards including the Eleanor Roosevelt Award for creativity at this year’s Utopia Film Festival.

She founded “Asian American Film Thing” and “Shoes off! Mouth off!” Both shows highlight Asian American Pacific Islander filmmakers, storytellers and musicians. The shows encourage AAPI artists to keep creating, even if they are a work in progress, nothing has to be perfect. She wants to create a safe space for the community to tell their stories.

She is currently working on her memoir “Rather give birth to Char Siu.”

Sheena Iyengar

S. T. Lee Professor of Business, Management Division

Sheena S. Iyengar is the inaugural S.T. Lee Professor of Business in the Management Division at Columbia Business School, and a world expert on choice and decision-making. Her book The Art of Choosing received the Financial Times and Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year 2010 award, and was ranked #3 on the Amazon.com Best Business and Investing Books of 2010. Her research is regularly cited in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and The Economist as well as in popular books, such as Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink and Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance. Dr. Iyengar has also appeared on television, including the Today Show, the Daily Show, and Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN. Her TED Talks have collectively received almost four million views and her research continues to inform markets, businesses, and individuals around the world.

Growing up in New York City as a blind Indian American and the daughter of immigrants, Dr. Iyengar began to look at the choices she and others had, and how to get the most from choice. She first started researching choice as an undergrad at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where she graduated with a B.S. in Economics. She received her Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Stanford University where her dissertation, “Choice and its Discontents,” received the Best Dissertation Award. Dr. Iyengar received the Presidential Early Career Award in 2002, and in 2011 and 2019, she was named a member of the Thinkers50, a global ranking of the top 50 management thinkers. She won the Dean’s Award for Outstanding Core Teaching from Columbia Business School in 2012 and was named one of the World’s Best B-School Professors by Poets and Quants. She has also given keynotes, and consulted for companies as wide ranging as Deloitte, Google, Bloomberg, Blizzard Entertainment, J.P. Morgan & Chase, and The North Face.

Lisa Andujar-Ray

Director of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, Dean's Office

Ana Campoverde

Director, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Dean's Office

Module Akinola

Faculty Director, Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics

Modupe Akinola is the Barbara and David Zalaznick Professor of Business at Columbia Business School and Faculty Director of the Sanford C. Bernstein & Co. Center for Leadership and Ethics. Prior to pursuing a career in academia, Professor Akinola worked in professional services at Bain & Company and Merrill Lynch. Professor Akinola examines how organizational environments- characterized by deadlines, multi-tasking, and other attributes such as having low status- can engender stress, and how this stress can have spill-over effects on performance.

She uses a multi-method approach that includes behavioral observation, implicit and reaction time measures, and physiological responses (specifically hormonal and cardiovascular responses) to examine how cognitive outcomes are affected by stress. In addition, Professor Akinola examines workforce diversity. Specifically, she examines the strategies organizations employ to increase the diversity of their talent pool. She also explores biases that affect the recruitment and retention of minorities in organizations.

Wei Cai

Assistant Professor of Business, Columbia Business School, Accounting Division

Wei Cai joined Columbia University in 2020. Her research interests revolve around management accounting, organizational culture, and diversity and inclusion. Her research broadly investigates how to measure and manage key organizational capital. For example, she examines how corporate leaders and managers can deliberately design and shape organizational culture, and improve organizational outcomes through innovative management control systems. She uses multiple research methods including statistical analyses of archival data sources, field experiments, and surveys. She closely collaborates with practitioners and collects unique data that can provide important managerial implications for the design of management control systems in shaping desirable organizational outcomes.

Jelani Cobb, Ph.D.

Dean and Henry R. Luce Professor of Journalism

Jelani Cobb, Ph.D. joined the Journalism School faculty in 2016 and became Dean in 2022. He has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2015. He received a Peabody Award for his 2020 PBS Frontline film Whose Vote Counts? and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Commentary in 2018. He has also been a political analyst for MSNBC since 2019.

He is the author of The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress and To the Break of Dawn: A Freestyle on the Hip Hop Aesthetic. He is the editor or co-editor of several volumes including The Matter of Black Lives, a collection of The New Yorker’s writings on race and The Essential Kerner Commission Report. He is producer or co-producer on a number of documentaries including Lincoln’s Dilemma, Obama: A More Perfect Union and Policing the Police.

Dr. Cobb was educated at Jamaica High School in Queens, NY, Howard University, where he earned a B.A. in English, and Rutgers University, where he completed his MA and doctorate in American History in 2003. He is also a recipient of fellowships from the Ford Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation and the Shorenstein Center at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government.

Adam Galinsky

Vice Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics

Adam Galinsky is the Vice Dean for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion and Paul Calello Professor of Leadership and Ethics at the Columbia Business School. Professor Galinsky has published more than 300 scientific articles, chapters, and teaching cases in the fields of management and social psychology. His research and teaching focus on leadership, negotiations, diversity, decision-making, and ethics.

Professor Galinsky co-authored the best-selling book, Friend & Foe (Penguin Random House, 2015). The book offers a radically new perspective on conflict and cooperation and has received uniformly positive reviews from the New York Times, Financial Times, Economist. His Ted talk, How to Speak Up for Yourself, is one of the most popular of all time with over 7.4 million views.

His research has received numerous national and international awards from the scientific community. In 2016, he received Career Trajectory Award given to one researcher each year for “uniquely creative and influential scholarly productivity at or near the peak of one's scientific career.” Poets and Quants selected Professor Galinsky as one of the World’s 50 Best B-School Professors (2012). In 2022, Columbia University honored him with its prestigious Mentoring Award for demonstrating “an exceptional commitment to faculty mentoring through their work with tenure-track and mid-career faculty in developing their careers.” He has received teaching awards at the Kellogg School of Management and Princeton University.

Michael Martin

J.D./M.B.A. Candidate, Columbia Law School, Columbia Business School

Michael is a rising young leader whose career and passion lies at the very intersection of law, business, and real estate. Michael is a current J.D./M.B.A. student at Columbia Law and Business Schools respectively, with an emphasis on leadership and real estate. Michael seeks to utilize her experiences and positions within these industries to accomplish more inclusive and equitable outcomes for underserved communities. She is particularly focused on the following: increasing access to legal processes and addressing housing disparities. Michael has years of both prior legal and business experience working in her family enterprise, Martin & Martin, LLP. Martin & Martin is one of the largest African American and female-owned law firms in Los Angeles. During her tenure at Martin & Martin, Michael led teams that designed and executed operations management-based projects that centered on the future of work and law. This work within the firm focused on remote platforms and the requisite cultures that are needed for remote businesses to thrive, along with projects that brought business models to bear to increase the access of individuals to legal services. She is a summa cum laude graduate from Drexel University, where she received her B.S. in Business Administration. Michael frequently volunteers for a non-profit that focuses on children and adults with autism in underserved communities.

Valerie Purdie-Greenaway

Professor of Psychology, Columbia University, Affiliate Professor of Management, Columbia Business School

Valerie Purdie-Greenaway's research promotes the development of research regarding people with threatened identities, and examines the consequences of their experiences for intergroup relations. Any individual can have part of his/her identity that is devalued or stigmatized in some way—women in the sciences, gay/lesbian, bi-sexuals in American society, aging workers in technology firms, African-Americans in intellectual settings, certain immigrants in the U.S.

We attempt to understand their experiences and, through research, uncover ways to improve how majority and minority group members “get along.” More recently our lab has incorporated broader lines of research that explores cultural psychology and economics as it applies to one’s group membership. To accomplish this mission, our research lab primarily conducts experimental laboratory and field studies.

Our philosophy is to design experiments that closely mirror real-world phenomena. This often takes us into police departments, legal settings, schools, businesses, and beyond. In recent years, we have started to explore the use of psycho-physiological techniques to understand how threats to our identity affect basic biological responses.

Maeve DuVally

Founder, Glasheen & Co.

Maeve is a multi-cultural communications specialist, storyteller and LGBTQ+ advocate. She has spent the bulk of her career as a journalist and corporate spokesperson, most recently at Goldman Sachs. After a lifetime of working for large companies, she is forging her own path, now consulting for corporations and other organizations on communications strategy and diversity, equity and inclusion. Maeve also mentors transgender people and is a frequent public speaker on LGBTQ+ workplace issues. She was a managing director in corporate communications at Goldman Sachs over an 18-year career. Prior to joining Goldman, Maeve worked in media relations at Merrill Lynch. Before that, she was a financial journalist and editor at Bridge News for nearly 15 years with stints in Tokyo, Washington D.C. and New York. She spent ten formative years in Japan in the 1980s and is fluent in the language. Maeve serves on the boards of GLAAD; the Knight-Bagehot Fellowship, a journalism non- profit; Connecticut-based LGBTQ+ health provider Anchor Health Initiative; and Trans New York. She earned a B.A. in English from Providence College in 1983 and was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism School in 1994. Soon to be a published author, her memoir, “Maeve Rising,” is due out through Sibylline Press in August 2023.

Claire Shipman

Report/Author/Board Chair, Columbia University

Claire Shipman ’86CC, MIA ’94 is a journalist, author, and public speaker. She is also Co-Chair of Columbia University's Board of Trustees. An expert on confidence and women’s leadership, she’s written four New York Times bestselling books, The Confidence Code, The Confidence Code for Girls, Living the Confidence Code and Womenomics. Her latest book, which came out in June, focused on women and power--The Power Code. Her co-author on all five has been the BBC’s Katty Kay. Shipman spent 15 years at ABC News, reporting on politics, international affairs to social issues. Before moving to ABC, she covered the White House and the Clinton administration for NBC news. Shipman also spent a decade at CNN, where she covered the White House, and five years at CNN’s Moscow bureau covering the collapse of the Soviet Union. She’s received numerous awards for her reporting, including a Peabody, a DuPont, and an Emmy. Shipman holds a graduate degree in international affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University and a Bachelor of Arts in Russian Studies from Columbia College.

Erika Hall

Associate Professor of Organization and Management, Emory University

Erika V. Hall is an Associate Professor of Organization and Management at the Goizueta Business School at Emory University. As a trained social psychologist, her research explores the powerful impact of stereotypes and the hidden content within them. Hall earned a PhD in Management & Organizations from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Professor Hall's work has appeared in academic journals such as Academy of Management Review, Journal of Applied Psychology, Psychological Science, and American Psychologist, and media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and NPR. She was honored as one of the “The World’s Best 40 Under 40 Business Professors” in Poets & Quants in 2016. In 2022, she was also one of Atlanta Business Chronicle's 40 under 40 honorees. Prior to graduate school, Hall was a Research Associate at Harvard Business School.

Genevieve Gregorich

PhD Candidate, Columbia Business School

Genevieve (Vivi) Gregorich is a PhD candidate in Management at Columbia Business School with a focus on Strategy. Her research examines the role of business in society, the interaction between social movements and organizations, organizational reputation management, nonmarket strategy, and zero- sum thinking. She has authored cases on personal strategy and innovation with a focus on the psychological conditions that generate innovative ideas and the political processes that push ideas through corporate and bureaucratic labyrinths. Genevieve served on the Student Advisory Council for the Phillips Pathway for Inclusive Leadership, a program designed to support MBA students in becoming more inclusive leaders and currently volunteers as a mentor for Columbia Undergraduate Business Scholars, a program that exposes a diverse group of undergraduate students to cutting-edge research. Before joining Columbia Business School, she graduated with a degree in Economics from Macalester College, where she competed as a dual-sport athlete in basketball and softball. Following graduation, Genevieve worked as a research assistant at the Federal Reserve Board in Washington, DC where she studied a range of topics, including trade policy, unionization, the manufacturing sector, and income inequality.

Kenji Yoshino

Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law

Kenji Yoshino is the Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law and the Director of the Meltzer Center for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging at NYU School of Law. A graduate of Harvard, Oxford, and Yale Law School, he specializes in constitutional law, antidiscrimination law, and law and literature. He has published widely in academic journals such as the Harvard Law Review and Yale Law Journal, as well as in more popular media such as the New York Times and the Washington Post. He is the author of four books, most recently SAY THE RIGHT THING: HOW TO TALK ABOUT IDENTITY, DIVERSITY AND JUSTICE.

Chris Washburne

Professor of Music and Musician, Columbia University

Chris Washburne is Professor of Music at Columbia University, Chair of the Music Department, and the Founder and of Columbia’s Louis Armstrong Jazz Performance Program. Chris Washburne has published numerous articles on jazz, Latin jazz, salsa, and popular music. His books include Bad Music: the Music We Love to Hate (Routledge, 2004), Sounding Salsa: Performing Latin Music in New York (Temple University Press, 2008), and Latin Jazz: the Other Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2020). As a trombonist has performed on over 150 recordings, two Grammy winners and seven Grammy nominated. He has been hailed as "One of the best trombonists in New York..." by Peter Watrous of The New York Times and “one of the most important trombonists performing today” by Brad Walseth of www.jazzchicago.net. He was voted as “Rising Star of the Trombone” numerous times in the annual Downbeat Critics Poll. He has performed with Tito Puente, Celia Cruz, Eddie Palmieri, Muhal Richard Abrams, Ruben Blades, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, Justin Timberlake, Marc Anthony, Björk, They Might Be Giants, Roscoe Mitchell, and the Duke Ellington Orchestra. He is the leader of the highly acclaimed SYOTOS Latin jazz band and the Rags and Roots jazz band.

Christine D. Gagnon

Head of Information Technology CFO Transformation, Honeywell

Christine joined Honeywell International Inc. in June of 2023 as Head of Information Technology CFO Transformation, based in global headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina. As a seasoned executive, and prior to joining Honeywell, she most recently held the positions of Chief Financial Officer, African Asset Finance Company and Chief Financial Officer, Roha Group Inc, a New York–based private equity firm, contemporaneously serving on the Audit Committee of a portfolio company and on the Board of several portfolio company subsidiaries.

he is a Certified Public Accountant with in-depth financial services experience across functions including accounting, finance, treasury, credit, legal, risk and operations. Over her 20+ year international career, having resided in Europe and Africa, in addition to her home country, Christine has served in both public and private sectors holding positions as EMEIA Chief Operating Officer, EMEIA Chief Financial Officer and Global Head of Go-to-Market, Financial Crime and Chief Operating Officer, Financial Services Africa at Ernst & Young LLP, First Vice President, Offices of the Chief Executive Officer and Vice Chairman at OneWest Bank and Senior Manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP. She graduated magna cum laude with Distinction from the University of Connecticut, earning a Bachelor of Science in Accounting, a Master of Science in Accounting and a Master of Business Administration.

She also attended Harvard Business School as well as Stanford University, focusing on corporate strategy and innovation and most recently completed a Master of Legal Studies at the Washington University School of Law. Christine is active in the veteran community volunteering for Hire Heroes USA; she also serves on the Board of The Partnership to End Homelessness, is the speaker coach for TEDx Columbia Business School and a member of TED. In 2021, she was named in Monitor's Top 50 Women in Equipment Finance.